Palestrina: please download and view the PDF in this post for your answer.

I've tried using Caeciliae in MS Word 2007, Open Office and MS Publisher 98. I can't get the font to do what I want it to, and I have followed the supplied instructions e.g. the clef will only appear on the second line from the bottom, even if I do press a number (e.g. 7) before pressing "d." Has anybody had the same sort of problem, and how did you solve it?

I think you are supposed to use that font with write.exe in Vista or in InDesign -- and this is why I've stayed away. I'm completely thrilled with Meinrad fonts, but I understand that there are problems with the new Mac OS

I have started using Gregorio to generate OpusTeX files of chants -- it's unbelievably fast. Way faster than the Meinrad fonts, which I feel like I wasted many hours with.

However, OpusTeX requires rather a lot of technical skill. I'm lucky to have known the LaTeX system from well before my need to typeset chant. The Meinrad fonts are not free, but they are very nice looking, and quite easy to use.

Caeciliae was written for applications that support OpenType features. Such applications include the Adobe suite of products (on Windows or MacOS X) and some applications in MacOS X. You will be severely limited if you are using other software.

Sorry: the Caeciliae site became a testing site for another project. I'm happy to send you the latest release of Caeciliae until it gets it's site back. Just send me an email (matthew@osjoseph.org).

-Bro. Matthew Spencer, OSJ

Thanks to both of you for your responses - I received the Caeciliae font from Bro. Matthew, and am quite happy with it.

Here is a page with the font delivery information

Now I need a composing app for the iPod.

Not sure what kind of font Meinrad is, but if you have a font program (like fontographer) you can add in your own liquescent climacus by copying a similar neume and then adjusting its vectors.

I am still studying using Finale with Medieval...it's taken some rethinking to adjust. Prior to this I used Caeciliae and still do, I recommend it highly.

My study of Medieval with Finale has answered many question about using Finale for round note chant, and may make it simple to create documents that offer both versions.

HELP... I am on a Mac and cant get the Clave to appear on the top line because I cannot figure out the mapping. Does anyone know! Trying to layout Vespers for tomorrow!

Francis,

In case you are not using THIS, please try it -=-=- Caeciliae Fonts for FREE!

Caecilia, because it is SO much easier to use

congrats Rev. Spencer! (I think you should call your font, 'Spencer')

Congratulations Fr Spencer.

Given that you have little time to devote to Caechiliae, have you considered making the font open source? I mean to say, providing the project files for the font, so that we as a community may continue to improve and refine the font? There are several things I would like to do with the font, first among them a "thick lines" face for people who need to xerox the scores. Also there are a few additional characters I'd like to add.

Thoughts?

I've also found Festa Dies to be very easy. It does take some time to make things look nice though.

Festa Dies has some nice glyphs too, and and it works pretty well in standard word processors which is great.

All:

I finally posted my dragndrop style of setting chant which you can see here:

http://musicasacra.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=5617&page=1#Item_3

Just discovered by accident that St. Meinrad has released their fonts for free on saintmeinradmusic.org.

I really don't care for their chant fonts--I use Fr. Spencer's font in InDesign--but I had a need to put some simple 5-line in a program and their melody font was easy enough to use. I really hate to go to Score for a simple "And with your spirit." in a pew card.

I've been hacking at Caeciliae square-notation font inside FontForge. Here is a newbie at font engineering, learning by fire. I may post a few findings of interest here, as I learn more.

To start, I may have solved Palestrina's problem from nine years back, namely that ligatures and/or glyph substitution was not working, i.e. "7p" producing a squiggly line + a note on the bottom pitch, rather than a note on the 7th pitch. It might've worked in InDesign, but not in Word. I dunno if Word 2007 supports ligatures, but I doubt anyone is still using that. In Word 2010, you have to go into Font Properties for the selected text (or style), then Advanced tab, and enable everything -- kerning, ligatures, and contextual alternatives. Word inanely keeps them off by default.

Even that doesn't work on its own, at least not with version 0.99 which is, what, a decade old now? Thing is, the font isn't even OpenType, despite what the website says. It's got the innards of it, but the file interpretation is wrong somehow. Even if you rename it from .ttf to .otf, it still appears in the word processor with the TrueType icon and no ligatures. To resolve, all I did was open it in FontForge, and export it out to a real OpenType (.otf), and voila. All is working.

Next quest is to make sense of ligatures vs. substitutions in order to mod the character mapping. It would be cool to type + or -, or < or > after a note, and have it move up or down in pitch. Who knows if that's possible? I tried making a custom font with only 4 characters, to see if I could create my own ligature or substitution. And it ain't working. Finding a mismatch between the custom and Caeciliae is a pain, because Caecilia covers the full unicode range and has 28 lookup tables. Would be much easier if he had the design documented. I don't even fathom the difference between ligature and substitution, but substitution lookups all require reference to other lookup tables -- pretty unhelpful upon first judgment.

@CatherineS I too use Caeciliae in Apple's Pages. While there have been one or two problems I have produced 100s of pages of Chant this way.